A/N: They shouldn't have provoked him.

  -x-X-x-

  If they’d bothered asking for her opinion, Sophia might have warned them how in over their heads they were. Then again, they were all God Hunters… so probably not. Admittedly this wasn’t the pn, but she should have known all along that her Otherworlder Servant would find a way to turn things into a bloodbath all the same.

  Faster than any of the mortal men in the room can react, Oren’s sword is out and the God Hunter Commander’s head flies off his shoulders. From there, everything becomes pure pandemonium as Oren turns and starts killing everyone else in the room with them as well.

  As God Hunters shout and scream, as body parts fly this way and that, Sophia is rather quickly forgotten amidst the chaos. Nobody is paying her any mind, mostly because they seem to be under the mistaken impression that they’re facing two gods now instead of one… and more importantly, that Oren is the actual combatant. They’re not wrong about that st bit to be fair.

  “SOUND THE ALARM, THE COMMANDER’S BEEN-ACK!”

  “Has to be a God of War, he-urk!”

  With a simple flex of her wrists, Sophia flings off the rope that had been not-so-securely binding her arms behind her back. She watches as Oren kills the st of the first batch, but by the time he’s done so, others have started to arrive. Some had been right outside the door and still more were racing down the makeshift hallways.

  This was, after all, once a Cathedral. The main hall might have been partitioned off for the God Hunters’ purposes, but it was done cheaply and haphazardly. The ‘walls’ of this makeshift headquarters were rather… thin. As evidenced by Oren literally throwing a God Hunter choking on his own blood through one of those walls as he pushes out of the office and into the rest of the building.

  Sophia stays behind, walking over to the desk and picking up the device that Commander Hogarth had used to identify her as a goddess. Popping it open, she frowns for a moment as she studies it. It’s rather simplistic… and yet, she can see it for what it really is. Enchanted. Magical. Divine.

  A god or goddess made this device. Probably one of Raythe’s allies, she imagined. And the man who might have had information for them… well, he’s dead. Sophia gnces to where Hogarth’s head nded, the aging mortal’s face forever etched in smug superiority. He’d died so fast that he didn’t even register it. Too busy being so confident in himself and his organization that he hadn’t considered just who or what he might be dealing with.

  And now it had gotten him and all of the men under his command killed. Even now, Sophia can hear the fighting taking pce outside. Wordlessly tucking the divinity detector away, she moves behind the Commander’s desk and begins pulling out drawers and looking at documents and letters for information.

  All the while, Oren is doing what he does best… making a mess of things. Sophia pays it little mind. Maybe she’s becoming desensitized to it all. Maybe she knew deep down inside that Oren wasn’t going to go along with her pn forever. It was what it was. Sophia wasn’t an idiot. The Minor Goddess of Wisdom was fully aware that she only had as much control over him as he allowed her at the end of the day.

  Perhaps the Otherworlder would go insane at some point and kill her too and that would be that. But it wasn’t like Sophia had anything else to live for besides her revenge. She would continue to seek out everyone involved in the massacre of the Heavens, and she wouldn’t rest until they were all dead… or she was.

  Silence falls over the Cathedral at a certain point, but Sophia barely pays that any mind as she continues reading the Commander’s correspondence. There’s some very interesting information in here, especially when she gets towards the oldest of Hogarth’s letters. Very interesting indeed.

  Finally though, Oren returns. He’s covered in blood of course, even as he wipes his sword clean. Stopping at the entrance to the office, he looks at her from across the room.

  “I went all the way to the entrance to the Temple District to take care of the God Hunters there as well. Then, I closed the gates to buy us some time… but I didn’t see or hear anyone out there in the rest of the city mobilizing either.”

  Sophia hums at that, before slowly nodding and holding up a letter she’d found in her exploration.

  “That’s not surprising, honestly. The Commander wasn’t bluffing. He has assurances here from City Leadership that they won’t allow the City Guard to enter the Temple District under any circumstances without express permission from him first. Apparently, they were happy to say that even the sounds of fighting would be ignored.”

  The City Guard would have to investigate eventually of course, but it wouldn’t surprise Sophia if they dragged their feet for quite some time. Really, it was interesting in a way. The God Hunters were still a new, insur organization. They’d spread their influence incredibly fast and wormed their way into every aspect of society with blinding speed, but while they might be able to force people to do what they wanted, they couldn’t exactly change mortal nature.

  And mortals, as her father had been fond of saying, LOVED to question things. Of course, now Sophia knew that the God Hunters had probably only spread as fast as they did and gained the authority they now wielded because of the backing of this additional faction of hidden gods. Even still, the rest of the mortals were starting to wake up, starting to realize that something was wrong. They were starting to get… disgruntled.

  Putting that from her mind for the moment, Sophia steps out from behind the Commander’s desk, once again gncing down at the dead man for a moment before looking back to Oren and sighing.

  “This wasn’t the pn, as you well know. That man had a magical artifact powered by the divine. One capable of detecting further divinity in close proximity. I would very much have liked to question him on exactly where he got it. But you just couldn’t stick to the pn.”

  Oren’s eyes drift down to the dead Commander as well for a moment before moving back to her.

  “No Goddess, I couldn’t. Not when many of them were clearly pnning on having their way with you.”

  Sophia stiffens at that, her eyes narrowing.

  “Excuse me?”

  But Oren doesn’t back down.

  “I recognize lustful hunger in my fellow man, Goddess. The way they were looking at you… your pn called for me to leave you in their clutches for hours, under the assumption that they would have perhaps let you stew for a while or only tortured you lightly at first. I came to the conclusion that that assumption was incorrect. They would have done whatever they wanted to you the moment I was gone. And their Commander would have let them because it would have improved morale and unit cohesion.”

  Her mouth opens and closes wordlessly for a moment at that. He couldn’t be serious… and yet, now that he’s said something, she finds herself relitigating every single gnce, every single look, every single gaze since they’d arrived in the Temple District. She hadn’t been paying that much attention to the small fry, admittedly. The true goal was a man like Commander Hogarth… a man with information.

  Indeed, if the God Hunter Officer had met with them alone or with less guards, she might have even altered the pn on the fly and had Oren bar the room so they could interrogate him properly.

  That hadn’t happened… but a lot else hadn’t happened as well. Sophia abruptly turns away from Oren, not wanting him to see her face in this moment. She’d very nearly been… they had… the goddess grabs the edge of the desk in front of her, gritting her teeth.

  He was right, damn it. Her original pn had been most unwise. Her own Domain forces her to acknowledge that fact now. Admittedly, Sophia didn’t really care if she lived or died at this point so long as her enemies died with her. But to suffer that sort of indignity? To be subjected to such ignobility? Fuck, he was right.

  She refuses to tell him that though. Sophia won’t let her father’s killer see her break. She won’t let him see her cry either. She’d done enough of that in the nights after Raythe’s death, when she was forced to once again confront the grief of losing everyone she knew and loved while at the same time living under the same cave roof as the man who did the deed.

  Slowly pulling herself together, Sophia pushes off of the desk and straightens up. When she turns back around to regard Oren again, it’s with a stone-like expression, her eyes like flint. Oren watches her, but if he notes her moment of weakness, he’s at least smart enough not to comment on it.

  “Apologies Goddess. I should have left the Commander alive and sughtered the rest. That way we could have gotten our answers from him still.”

  … Yes, that’s right. That’s what he should have done. Grasping onto Oren’s words, Sophia responds in a clipped tone.

  “Next time, do better.”

  She doesn’t accept his apology, nor does she comment on her own failings. That’s not the kind of retionship she intends to have with the man who killed her father. Oren is a weapon… and nothing more.

  “Fortunately for you, all is not lost. There are still answers to be had here in this pce… answers down below, in what used to be this Cathedral’s catacombs.”

  Oren raises an eyebrow, even as Sophia holds aloft some of the papers she’d pilfered from Commander Hogarth.

  “I now know what happened to Aureo, the God of the River that flows through this city. The mortals in charge of Goldriver sold him out to the God Hunters because they believed they didn’t need him anymore, and the God Hunters paid better. It allowed Commander Hogarth and his men to establish an early foothold in this city, at which point they ransacked the Temple District, sughtered the priests and priestesses here, and began using Goldriver as a staging ground to hunt down every deity in the region.”

  Oren remains silent, processing her words for a moment as Sophia hums and then begins heading for the door and out into the hallway. There’s bodies everywhere of course… but they’re God Hunters and she can’t really bring herself to care. Aside from making sure she doesn’t get their blood on her shoes at least. Carefully making her way around them, she feels Oren following her at her back and continues expining.

  “Goldriver’s leadership expected the God Hunters to kill Aureo, of course. But Hogarth was a bit smarter than that. So long as Aureo still lived, Goldriver had to continue pying ball. Because if anything happened to the God Hunters here in the Temple District and Aureo was allowed to get free… well, that would be very bad for Goldriver, wouldn’t it?”

  “… I imagine so, Goddess.”

  Sophia just smirks. It takes a moment, but she eventually finds a staircase leading downwards into the Cathedral’s catacombs. Catacombs which, from Hogarth’s own documents, she knows have been repurposed into a prison for the divine beings they capture, be they gods or demigods.

  … Her smirk drops however when the smell hits her like an invisible wall. The blood and viscera coating the Cathedral up above weren’t exactly pleasant by any means, but this… this is somehow making that feel like a walk in the park. She barely makes it halfway down the spiral staircase before she has to brace herself against the wall for a moment, gagging a bit.

  “Ugh… this is…”

  Oren is smart enough not to touch her, but he does hover at her side… and silently offer her his hand. Truthfully, she half-expected him to make some cutting remark about how ‘this is where she would have ended up if they’d followed through with her full pn’. But… he doesn’t. That’s the only reason Sophia finally takes ahold of his arm, using him to support herself even as they continue down the stairs.

  … She was wrong. The catacombs haven’t been converted into a prison. They’ve been converted into a charnel house. Divine blood is spilled everywhere, and she can see runes on the walls meant to contain divine power. Indeed, as they enter the catacombs, Sophia feels her own divinity restrained and bound. This would be how they were able to torture, dismember, and kill gods and goddesses, even without Celestial Metal. A shiver runs down Sophia’s spine as she realizes she would not have been able to escape on her own if she’d wound up down here without Oren…

  “Are you okay Goddess? Should we go back up?”

  “I’m… I’m f-fine. And no, we can’t leave. Just… strike through those runes with the dagger. Then we can continue on.”

  Oren nods sharply and pulls the dagger made of Celestial Metal from the small of his back. He steps forward and sshes through each of the runes on the wall, and piece by piece Sophia feels her divinity returned to her. She can breathe again, though the rest of the pce is still grotesque to the extreme.

  They continue on like that, deeper and deeper into the catacombs. There’s practically nothing still alive down here. Deities, demigods, and divine beings of all stripes have been brought here. Goldriver must be the central hub for the God Hunters’ actions in this region. Given the rarity of Celestial Metal, they probably had to capture most deities and then bring them here to do the actual executions. But before the executions, they clearly tortured their prisoners thoroughly.

  But as awful as the sights down here were, Sophia has to keep her eye on the prize. They came to Goldriver hoping to pry information about any nearby deities from the God Hunters’ hands. Instead, she had confirmation that there was a living deity here in the city itself, beneath the God Hunters’ headquarters. This wasn’t an opportunity they could afford to pass up.

  Finally, Sophia senses it. Up ahead, she feels the faintest flicker of divine power. As Oren continues to strike through runes with the dagger, that faint flicker grows… but only to a certain extent. The divinity up ahead is still breathing, but that’s about the most Sophia can say for it. Still, she knows they’ve found who they were looking for when they finally stand in front of a makeshift cell that still has a living occupant.

  There in the darkness, breathing boriously, still alive after months of captivity at the hands of the God Hunters, lies Lord Aureo, Minor God of the River.

  -x-X-x-

  A/N: Eyyyy, a god who doesn't want to kill them both! How exciting~

  As always, leave a Like and let me know what you think please!

  Patreon Plug: The next TEN chapters of this story can be found over on my Patreon for early access under The Age of Chaos Collection if you want to read ahead! Until the end of March use code 830B9 at checkout for a 16% discount on the first Month of my Patreon, OR simply sign up for an Annual Pledge with a 16% discount baked in for the whole year!